Baseball

American Presidents, Baseball, Obama, Politics

The Great Race

Posted on by christian

snow whiteGrand Old Pretenders

George Will has finally written what many Republicans are thinking: these folks aren’t ready for prime time. In his Sunday column, Will laments the “vibrations of weirdness” emanating from the prospective GOP presidential field.

Exhibit A this week is Mike Huckabee, often seen as the GOP front runner in what blogger Taegan Goddard calls “the Fox News primary.” The wise New York Times columnist Tim Egan, still a hard-nosed, fact-based reporter at heart, lays bare Huckabee’s “misspeak” this week about Barack Obama’s growing up in Kenya. Of course, Huckabee got that all wrong. Obama grew up in Hawaii (still one of the 50 states), spent some time in Indonesia and didn’t visit Kenya until he was in his 20’s.

But, as Egan points out, Huckabee not only misspoke, he had a whole line of factless argument built around Obama the Kenyan. This wasn’t a slip of the tongue, but a premeditated argument aimed at driving the wedge over whether Obama is really one of us.

Even more damaging to Huckabee is Egan’s reporting on the fictions around a the case of a parolee that Huckabee never really had to explain during his short run for the GOP nomination in 2008. Read Egan’s reporting and see if this guy really has a chance.

Here’s a bet that Huckabee opts to stay on Fox as a talk show host rather than troop around in the snow in Iowa and New Hampshire. Egan’s piece will haunt him either way.

George Will, meanwhile, does not count The Huck in the five candidates – Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, Tim Pawlenty, Haley Barbour and Mitch Daniels – that he sees as the great hope of the GOP. But, as he writes, “the nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons.”

Exhibit B: Another piece this week, also in the Post, detailing the relationship – if that is the right word for it – between Huntsman and Romney. Reporter Jason Horowitz’s fascinating piece about the two ambitious LDS politicians says: “The respective former governors of Utah and Massachusetts have vast fortunes, silver tongues and great hair. They are also distant cousins, descended from a Mormon apostle who played a key role in the faith’s founding. The two men enjoyed the early support of powerful and devout fathers and performed the church’s missionary work – Romney in France during the Vietnam War and Huntsman in Taiwan.”

Horowitz goes on to make the case that both Huntsman and Romney wanted to run the Salt Lake City Olympics, knowing that the high profile post would help their political aspirations. When Romney won out, the two men’s personal and family connection was badly frayed. Horowitz also gets into the issue of which of the men is the “better Mormon.”

Neither the Huckabee story line this week nor the Romney-Huntsman feud can possibly be the narrative Republican strategists are hoping to develop. At this point, in the desperate race for money and attention, this kind of story line doesn’t help build momentum, but does raise questions that will linger and linger, first among the chattering classes and eventually among the voters.

Former Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus – he won his share of elections – has a favorite saying: “you can’t win a horse race with a dog.” Admittedly, it’s early, very early, in the all-too-long political nominating process. The economy and Middle East oil prices may yet be a greater threat to Obama than anyone in the Republican field but, having said that, none of these contenders is reminding anyone of Ronald Reagan, or even Howard Baker, Bob Dole or John McCain.

The weirdness is vibrating and no one is running the lemonade stand.

Baseball, Politics

Myths and More

Posted on by christian

flagSomethings Just Ain’t So

How many times have you heard someone say – usually a politician – “Americans have the best health care in the world.”

Or this one – no one goes hungry in America. Or, America is the world leader in – fill in the blank.

Truth be told, we aren’t leading the world in much these days. Our health care is the most expensive in the world, but by almost any measure no where close to the best. And, according to a recent USDA report, fully 15 percent of Americans are now food “insecure,” literally unsure where the next meal is coming from.

One of the great challenges to American democracy, made particularly acute by the vast expansion of “information” available to all of us every minute of every day, is the challenge of separating what we think we know from what is really, verifiably true.

Some of the myths, 51 percent of likely Republican primary voters don’t believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, for example, serve to warp political judgments and reinforce a constant theme of some of his opponents that Obama is “not like us.” It is a myth that serves some political ends.

Other myths, like the oft repeated notion that the NFL Super Bowl is the most watched sporting event in the world, just play to the old notion that if it happens here it must be the biggest, the best, the most important. Actually, the World Cup soccer championship, thanks to a truly world-wide audience, gets more viewers than the Packers beating the Steelers.

Some of the so called “mainstream media” are trying to debunk some of the myths out there. The Washington Post runs a regular feature – “Five Myths” – that puts the facts back into common myths. Its good stuff. A recent piece by Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer challenged the myth that the 16th president was “just a country lawyer.” He wasn’t.

Holzer writes: “…in the 1850s [Lincoln] ably (and profitably) represented the Illinois Central Railroad and the Rock Island Bridge Co. – the company that built the first railroad bridge over the Mississippi River – and earned a solid reputation as one of his home state’s top appeals lawyers.”

New York Times graphic columnist Charles Blow is another of the mythbusters. His recent piece compared the United States to more than 30 other countries on the basis of the International Monetary Fund assessment of the conditions that contribute to an “advanced economy.”

We don’t fare very well.

Our income inequality has us compared – is unfavorably the word – to Hong Kong. We’re doing better on unemployment than Greece or Spain, but no where near as well as Switzerland, Denmark or even Canada. With regard to life expectancy, we’re not nearly as good as France, but about as good as Cyprus. Cyprus?

We have the largest number of people incarcerated per 100,000 citizens of any place in the world. More than 700 per 100,000 in jail here. It’s about 50 per 100,000 in Iceland. Little wonder our corrections costs are running wild.

Student math achievement is – big surprise – way behind Japan, Korea and Singapore. And, food security. No one goes hungry in Belgium or Austria. We’re the worst of the worst in the “advanced economy” class when it comes to food security.

There is an old saying in politics that holds that you will know that a candidate for public office is in trouble when he or she starts believing their own press releases. In other words, the spin of what we’d like to be able to accomplish overtakes the reality of what we are really living. We start living myths, substituting our opinions for facts.

Amid all the talk about “American exceptionalism” we struggle to separate the myths of our standing in the world from the reality of our challenges. All the while, the rest of the world is catching up, or already leading us and, in many cases, moving on.

Mark Twain said, I think, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Air Travel, Baseball, Books, Politics

President’s Day

Posted on by christian

buchananGreat Readers

James Buchanan was the 15th President of the United States and by nearly universal assessment the worst we’ve ever had. He dithered while the Union came apart, helped precipitate Bleeding Kansas and did nothing to help Lincoln during the succession crisis in the last days of his administration. Mark Buchanan as a near complete failure…except as it turns out the guy was a great reader.

The Daily Beast website has a fun series of short profiles of the presidents who were most in love with books. You would guess, of course, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and the two Roosevelts, but Buchanan or Rutherford B. Hayes? Hayes amassed a personal library of 12,000 volumes and Herbert Hoover, a very smart man and not a very effective president, had a library of rare books on obscure science subjects and many were in Latin.

The same website has a Presidential Trivia Quiz today.

Who was the first president to fly in an airplane? Hard to believe, but true, only one president is buried in Washington, D.C. and, believe it or not, Jimmy Carter was the first president born in a hospital.

So…on President’s Day, a toast – a rare toast – to James Buchanan, a bad president, but a book lover. With that knowledge, he can be modestly redeemed in my eyes.

 

Andrus Center, Baseball

Shoulda Known…

Posted on by christian

metsThe Mets and Madoff

As if you need another reason to dislike the serial Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff, now it turns out the swindler was a New York Mets fan.

Figures.

According to a lawsuit filed against the Mets’ owners, the Wilpon boys and Saul Katz, the team and owners allegedly reaped $300 million in fictitious profits from Madoff’s various schemes. I guess in Metsland that’s at least enough to buy a journeyman left fielder.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, “The suit, which also described a more than 25-year relationship between Mr. Madoff and the co-owners of the Mets, said Messrs. Wilpon, Katz and Madoff served on the boards of the same charities, and had season tickets near one another at Mets games. They traveled together with their wives when the Mets played exhibition games in Japan one year, according to the lawsuit, and Mr. Wilpon even helped Mr. Madoff when he was looking for new office space.”

In August of 1921, then-Baseball Commissioner Keneshaw Mountain Landis banned for life eight Chicago White Sox ballplayers who had been acquitted in a jury trial where they were accused of throwing the 1919 Major League Baseball World Series.

Landis, a federal judge as well as the commissioner, issued a terse statement: “Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player who undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player who sits in confidence with a bunch of crooked ballplayers and gamblers, where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will never play professional baseball.”

Alrighty then.

The Mets’ owners, as far as we know, didn’t undertake to throw games. Why would they, the Mets win so infrequently anyway, but the owners certainly did “sit in confidence” with a bunch of crooks in the person of Bernie Madoff and his crew all the while ignoring warning signs that something wasn’t right here.

The Mets’ best defense, as Buster Olney cracked, may be that “we signed Oliver Perez and Luis Castillo to $60m deals-and WE were supposed to sniff out Ponzi scheme?”

Let’s call it the stupid rich guy defense.

Commissioner Bud Selig, not that he ever would, should move immediately to ban the Met owners. The trial, the attending soap opera, the greed and avarice sure to emerge will, all by itself, be detrimental to the game.

Baseball, considering the steroids scandal and the unbelievably slack response to that outrage, could benefit from holding to a higher standard and a higher standard could start with zero tolerance for the owners of a Major League franchise sitting in confidence with one of the greatest crooks in American history.

Baseball, Politics

The Mormon Primary

Posted on by christian

Massachusetts-Gov-Mitt-Romney-left-and-UtahRomney vs. Huntsman

Here’s a fascinating subtext to the upcoming Republican presidential primary: Two successful, politically astute, handsome, wealthy, Mormon Republicans with deep ties to Utah and Idaho could face off in the race.

It’s clear that 2008 contender, and one-time front runner, Mitt Romney will run again. He even showed up on David Letterman’s show this week – Dave tweaked him for not wearing a necktie – to take the barbs that go with reading a Top Ten List of things we don’t know about him. Number Two, Romney joked: “I have absolutely no idea where my birth certificate is.”

Meanwhile, Huntsman, the fluent Mandarin speaker, is resigning as our ambassador to China to come home and put together the pieces of a run for the White House. White House insiders have had fun with this, while no doubt being really steamed about what they see as an act of a political turncoat. Huntsman was called “the Manchurian Candidate,” for example, by new Chief of Staff Bill Daley and President Obama himself joked, “I’m sure that having worked so well with me will be a great asset in any Republican primary.”

In a fascinating piece, Politico calls this “The Mormon Primary,” and notes that the two men have little apparent regard for each other. Huntsman supported John McCain in 2008.

Politico says of the likely match-up: “The implications for Republicans are stark: Their front-runner, Romney, struggled in his 2008 bid to make gains with the evangelical Christians who play an important role in Republican primaries and saw his religion as exotic, or worse.

“The presence of a second Mormon in the race could help Romney by making the church seem less unusual to those who are unfamiliar with it. But it seems just as likely that Huntsman, with his strikingly similar profile, would erode Romney’s base of support, reordering the GOP field.”

In Utah, where folks know Romney as the savior of the 2002 Winter Olympics and Huntsman as a successful governor from a very prominent business family, a recent poll shows the former Massachusetts governor, not the former Utah governor, as the favorite of Utah Republicans. Writing at the Utah Policy website, Bob Bernick, dissects the polling, the politics and the religion and the LDS Church-owned Deseret News rounds up some of the national coverage the potential match-up has been generating.

An underlying theme in the national attention on these two men is, of course, their religious faith and its clear from the 2008 race that Romney’s LDS faith presented real problems when it came to his appeal to the evangelical base of the modern Republican Party.

As the respected analyst Stuart Rothenberg wrote back then: “Many in the media portray evangelical attitudes toward Mormonism as a form of bigotry and religious intolerance akin to the anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic sentiment that was once so prevalent in this country and is much rarer these days. But it is a very different kind of concern, a concern about the meaning of Christianity.”

At least one other thing is fascinating about both Romney and Huntsman being in the GOP primary hunt. Both have real records. Romney’s in business, the Olympic turnaround and as a Blue State governor who championed a health care bill not all that dissimilar to the Republican hated Obamacare. Huntsman’s record involves time as an innovative governor who then resigned that post to accept the appointment of a Democratic president to a very high profile diplomatic post.

While Romney has been hitting the hustings in New Hampshire and courting the Tea Party, Huntsman, as a diplomat, has largely been a back bench observer of issues like health care, the Wall Street bailout and the political turmoil that lead to a GOP takeover of the House.

Which posture – Romney’s or Huntsman’s – offers the best positioning for 2012? We may be about to find out.

Baseball, Christie, Economy, Politics

Now We Know – Maybe

Posted on by christian

finance-crisis-photo1Legislate Then Investigate

The commission investigating the causes of the “worst economic crisis since the Great Depression” has issued its report and – big surprise – the group split along partisan lines. Democrats issued a majority report, while Republicans offered their own take on who and what was to blame for the Great Recession; the recession that is technically over, but still seems to hang around like a relative who just doesn’t know when to leave once the Thanksgiving dinner is over.

One of the better bits of analysis of the huge report is from former Bush speechwriter David Frum.

Frum writes: “The report…argues that everything that people needed to know was there to be known. The crisis was not a ‘hurricane’: It was more like a housefire in a home where people routinely smoked in bed.”

And there’s this: “Americans withdrew $2.0 trillion in home equity between 2000 and 2007. At a time of stagnating incomes for most Americans, the housing boom financed the appearance of economic progress – one reason government was so reluctant to act. Minus the housing bubble, I doubt very much that President Bush would have been re-elected in 2004.“

If you really want to get into this analysis, here are some terrific charts that help to break up the hard facts into somewhat understandable chunks.

One of the striking conclusions you reach in reviewing this new report and in reading the mountain of writing that has been produced in books and articles is that many of the so called Titans of Wall Street had, at best, a weak grasp on the facts of the situation facing the economy, not to mention detailed knowledge of what was happening in their own institutions.

One juicy headline from the Commission’s work is the admission by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, an academic scholar of the Great Depression by the way, that 12 of the 13 major Wall Street financial firms were at the very brink of failure late in 2008.

Unfortunately the work of the Commission, tainted by the lack of political consensus, is likely to take us no where in particular. The hopes that a rational, coherent explanation of what cause the economic collapse would lead to a careful reassessment of whether more regulation is needed, whether the biggest of the big banks are too big, etc. just hasn’t happened.

In fact, unlike the justly celebrated Pecora Commission in the early 1930’s that lead to the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the passage of banking regulation that, seems to me, served us pretty well for the rest of the century, Congress legislated before the Commission reported. Hope they got it right.

Here is some sobering news for the week just ending, the week that saw the Dow top 12,000 and in which it was reported that a Wall Street hedge fund manager personally made $5 billion in profits last year, “Our financial system is really not very different today in 2011 than it was in the run up to this crisis.”

That quote comes from one of the commission members, Byron Georgiou, who spent the last year trying to understand why we came so close to complete economic disaster; a disaster that has done so much short- and long-term damage to so many people.

Here’s hoping we aren’t setting ourselves up for an even more devastating Round Two.

Andrus Center, Baseball, John Kennedy, Johnson, Politics

Odds and Ends

Posted on by christian

catchersOf No Particular Importance…

Most major league baseball teams have pitchers and catchers report to spring training round about Feb. 14. It doesn’t mark the end of winter, but perhaps the beginning of the end and that is something.

Boston has had 50 inches of snow this winter. Do you think Red Sox fans are anxious for spring?

I’m still nursing the hurt over the Diamondbacks and Rockies abandoning Tucson in favor of another spring training outpost in the Phoenix suburbs. So much for old school. Baseball in the spring has been a fixture in Tucson since 1946. Not this year. The D-backs and Colorado will share a spanking new ballpark – Salt River Fields. I’m boycotting and plan on seeing the hapless Cubs in Mesa, the A’s in their venerable little band box in Phoenix and the World Champions in downtown Scottsdale.

Hope springs eternal in the spring. Everyone is in first place on opening day.

Kennedy Memories

My old friend Joel Connelly had a nice piece recently at the Seattle P-I’s online site on memories of John Kennedy in the Northwest. Joel, a great recorder of the region’s political lore, relates a wonderful story about JFK and legendary Washington Sen. Warren Magnuson.

The Times on the Times

I’ve long believed the single most difficult thing for “the media” to do is to report on itself. Most reporters and editors are generally loathe to criticize each other, unless its someone like Bill O’Reilly tweaking Keith Olbermann. That makes this story in the New York Times reporting on dissatisfaction in Los Angeles with the L.A. Times so interesting.

Here’s the money quote. The NYT’s media critic quotes a long-time LA Times reader as saying: “We need a paper that’s more, and this is less. I think it’s just not a world-class paper, no matter how you cut it. It used to be a world-class paper.”

Analysis and comment at the Columbia Journalism Review site further dissects the Times coverage of the Times. My take: I have long admired both papers and have had my gripes with each, but the LA Times is today a far cry from what it was when Otis Chandler was in charge.

Sargent Shriver

Lots of memorials, appropriately, to the first man JFK put in charge of the Peace Corps – Sargent Shriver. The wake for the very Catholic Shriver was a classic sad and hilarious recalling of his quite remarkable life.

The serious side of Shriver is well summarized in a nice piece by Richard Reeves and the funniest story was told in Adam Clymer’s tribute at the Daily Beast.

Clymer told a story he attributed to Democratic consultant Bob Shrum, a longtime friend of Shriver’s. “One afternoon [Shrum] and Shriver arrived at the Shriver home as Eunice was running a Special Olympics event. She had put out a wine punch for the athletes’ parents. Sarge sampled it and asked what wine was used. A servant said Eunice had told them to just take anything handy. They had opened a case of Chateau Lafite Rothschild ’48, a gift from Giscard d’Estaing, president of France when Shriver served as ambassador. Shrum reports that Shriver was momentarily nonplussed, but then smiled and said, ‘Then we’d better drink a lot of it.'”

I have no idea what a bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild ’48 is worth, but a bottle of ’82 sold at a wine auction in 2009 for $3,300. The 1948 vintage is rated as a “moderate to good vintage.”

That was some wine punch.

Air Travel, Baseball, Books, Politics

Great Political Reads

Posted on by christian

political booksA Top Ten List

Legislatures are in session, the president is poised to deliver the State of the Union and we just marked the 50th anniversary of JFK’s inaugural. All politics all the time.

So…writing recently about Richard Ben Cramer’s political classic What It Takes got me thinking about some of my favorite political reads. Here, in no particular order, is a Top Ten List of Political Reads – or a Top Eleven counting Cramer’s tome, which has to be on any list of mine. Here goes.

1. Truman by David McCullough. Certainly among the greatest political biographies, McCullough won the Pulitzer for his great writing and research and this booked helped rehabilitate the reputation of the Man from Missouri.

2. They Also Ran by Irving Stone. This is the fascinating story of the men who ran for president and lost. In chapter length profiles, Stone groups these “losers” into categories like “Generals Die in the Army” and “Wall Street Lawyers.” This classic was published in 1943, so it ends with the story of that “loser” Wendell Willkie who, with the full benefit of hindsight, seems to have been a remarkable man. In fact, Stone makes a compelling case that many of those who ran for the White House and lost were every bit as able – and often better – than those who won.

3. Shooting Star by Tom Wicker. There are many, many good books about controversial Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, but if you read just one you will find none better than Wicker’s little volume. The great one-time New York Times writer establishes McCarthy in his times with all his well-documented excesses, but also offers a nuanced view – too nuanced for some critics – of McCarthy’s troubled personality. This is a critical book, but also fair and full of color sustained by the perspective of a political reporter who knows politics and politicians.

4. Huey Long by T. Harry Williams. Another biography, this one exhaustive, of another demagogue. Long was a brilliant Louisiana communicator/politician who rose from humble beginnings to command a virtual state dictatorship. Williams’ book is highly readable and, some would argue, more sympathetic to the Kingfish than it should be, but it is also a classic work of political history. By 1935, Long had become a national figure – his radio speeches were powerful, funny and frightening. He also became a threat from the left to Franklin Roosevelt’s re-election. Long’s life ended in September 1935 in a hail of gunfire in the hallway of the capitol building he had built in Baton Rouge, but the Long dynasty survived. The Long family produced another governor, a congressman and Huey’s senator son Russell who, like his papa, was one of the great political figures in the history of the United States Senate.

5. Advice and Consent by Allen Drury. Drury was a Congressional correspondent when he wrote his classic 1959 novel about a bitter Senate confirmation battle. The book has lasting appeal as a look inside the exclusive club, complete with deals, double crosses, sex, scandal and statesmanship.

6. Senator Mansfield by Don Oberdorfer. Montana’s Mike Mansfield was a great Senator and perhaps, with apologies to Lyndon Johnson, the most constructive Senate Majority Leader in history. In former Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer’s masterful biography, Mansfield emerges as a great thinker and a profoundly decent man; the model of a modern senator.

7. The 103rd Ballot by Robert K. Murray. It is hard to believe these days, with our national political conventions little more than carefully choreographed TV commercials, that years ago the conventions were great political theatre where presidential candidacies were both born and buried. In 1924, Democrats took an unbelievable 103 ballots to nominate a compromise candidate John W. Davis who, not surprisingly, took the horribly divided party to disastrous defeat. That convention – one observer noted that Democrats had taken a week to commit political suicide – is detailed in Murray’s colorful history, complete with the KKK, prohibition, religion and, did I mention, large doses of bare knuckle politics.

8. Five Days in Philadelphia by Charles Peters. There have been, I think, two absolutely pivotal presidential elections in American history: 1864 when Lincoln was re-elected and thereby able to prosecute the Civil War to its ultimate end and 1940 when Franklin Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term and a chance to lead the country away from isolationism. Peters’ great little book centers on the GOP nominating process in 1940 and the convention in Philadelphia that nominated Wendell Willkie. Willkie was the last true “dark horse” to win a presidential nomination.

9. Mick – The Real Michael Collins by Peter Hart. I’m both fascinated and repelled by the complex and frequently awful history of modern Irish politics. Any effort to understand the complex tale of modern Ireland must include the story of the great Irish Republican leader Michael Collins. Collins was both general and politician, but mostly brilliant political strategist and manager. He was also clever, ambitious, brave and brutal. He lost his life during the Irish Civil War in 1922. Collins had a pivotal role in the negotiations with the British – the British delegation included Winston Churchill – that resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The treaty helped secure Irish independence, but was so unpopular with some that it also precipitated the civl war. As a practical, pragmatic peacemaker, Collins defended the treaty and knew that in doing so he might well have written his death warrant. Nearly 90 years after his death, Collins’ grave in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery is still every day festooned with fresh flowers.

10. Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro. Caro’s monumental, multi-volume biography of LBJ is notable for the vast reach of his research, but also for his unrelenting (and at times unfair) critique of Johnson’s remarkable career. Still, the third volume on Johnson’s years as Senate Majority Leader, is as good a portrait of the Senate as any every crafted. The publication of the final volume of Caro’s nearly life-long work on Johnson will be a major milestone, but who knows when he’ll be finished with it. Caro took 12 years to write Master of the Senate. It is a huge book and hugely important.

There you have it – a Top Ten list for a political junkie.

Baseball, Giffords, John V. Evans, Politics

Tragedy in Tucson

Posted on by christian

giffordsPolitics, Guns and America

President Obama spoke for most Americans yesterday, as presidents do when tragedy strikes and something truly senseless happens, when he said we “would get to the bottom” of the horrific events on a sunny Saturday morning outside a Safeway store in Tucson.

Get to the bottom indeed.

We all tend to measure the impact of big events by the closeness of personal connection. For me, this one is close and truly does, as Tucson resident and former Bush Administration Surgeon General Richard Carmona said, make your heart bleed.

I spend a good deal of time in Tucson. Our place is less than two miles from where the mayhem that took six lives, including a respected federal judge and a nine year old girl, took place. I’ve been in that Safeway store a hundred times, often on a sunny Saturday morning, to get my daily newspaper fix.

I’ve also followed from a distance the promising political rise of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who now fights for her life not to mention a chance for a further political career. Before going to Congress, Giffords represented parts of Tucson in the state legislature and struck me – regardless of your partisan tint – as the kind of bright, well-spoken, committed young person we want and desperately need in our politics.

While it is much too early to come to judgments about the motive – if any – of the apparently badly troubled young man who is in custody and accused, perhaps with unidentified others, as the murderer. It is nonetheless inevitable that getting to the bottom of this American tragedy will turn to politics and guns.

It is already being asked if our American political culture has become so coarse, so bitter and tinged with the language of violence that such events directed at political people are made more possible. An eyewitness to the Tucson events said there was no doubt the gunman’s real target was the Congresswoman.

The wise and experienced old sheriff of Pima County, Clarence Dupnik – he’s been sheriff for 30 years and is respected for his blunt candor – said it explicitly.

“Let me say one thing,” the 73-year old Dupnik told reporters yesterday, “because people tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public by the people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.”

Dupnik, in sadness and in anger, said Arizona has become “a Mecca” for intolerance and bigotry.

This much we know. Giffords’ Tucson office was vandalized during the intense blizzard of national vitriol surrounding the health care legislation, she was shouted down at town hall meetings and, by all accounts, the campaign in Arizona’s 8th District last year was bitter and nasty. And, of course, Sarah Palin and others used tough language and imagery, including putting crosshairs over Giffords’ district, to target her for defeat last November.

Giffords made note of the Palin’s actions last fall when she said, “She [Palin] depicted the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, they have to realize there are consequences.” Palin, it must be noted, was one of the first to condemn the outrage.

Ironically, Giffords was a true moderate in the House. She was a “Blue Dog” Democrat who cast a protest vote last week again Nancy Pelosi. She voted instead for civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis, who was himself once beaten senseless in the name of politics. Giffords proudly read the First Amendment on the House floor last week during the reading of the Constitution and she was widely regarded as a calming voice in a divided district.

Consequences. Words are powerful weapons and, at times, the alarming coarseness of American political rhetoric does seem seriously deranged and dangerous. Calls for civility have never seemed more timely or more necessary. The Los Angeles Times editorialized this morning calling out the truly moronic postings – from all points of view – regarding the Giffords shooting. Read it and weep again.

Getting to the bottom also requires a mature society to engage in real and sober self-reflection about our culture of guns. I know, I know, this is the third rail of American politics, but finding the discussion uncomfortable or politically difficult doesn’t make the self-reflection any less important. How can a culture that claims to value the sanctity of life tolerate the level of gun violence we seem to now find tolerable?

Once again American politics intersects with guns and violence. Ours is a great country, but the tragedy in Tucson suggests once more many uncomfortable things about our less-than-perfect Union. We have some work to do to get to the bottom and try to learn from – and rise above – yet another horrific tragedy.

Baseball, CIA, Military History, Politics

That’s Accountability

Posted on by christian

LewdNavyStIf All Government Operated This Way

Accountability, at least most of the time, is sure and swift in the United States military. Just ask Captain Owen Honors, who has been sacked as the C.O. of one of the U.S. Navy’s most prestigious sea commands.

By now most everyone has heard the story of how Honors, as the then-Executive Officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise, hosted racy videos with homophobic, sexual and other offensive content that were broadcast during “movie nights” on the big aircraft carrier. He subsequently became the Commanding Officer of the Enterprise, the videos came to light and his career is as ruined as it would have been if he had run his ship aground in San Francisco bay.

The certainty of consequences for bad behavior or unethical conduct is one of the reasons that order, morale and effectiveness remain as high as they do in our all-volunteer military, while at the same time two wars and countless deployments have made military life incredibly difficult for thousands of young American men and women.

As I read about the Captain’s truly silly behavior – and, yes, I admit to finding the videos on YouTube and did take a look – I thought about the relative lack of accountability for bad behavior or performance on the civilian side of our government. It is a truly bipartisan problem.

Take your pick: the Treasury Secretary’s failure to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes, various senators in both parties with ethical problems ranging from sweetheart home loans to sexual peccadilloes, heck even a former New York governor now has a prime time show on cable while the documentary about his frequent visits with prostitutes runs in theaters. Closer to home, a sitting Idaho state representative remains dogged by his tax problems and an Idaho tax commissioner operates under an ethical cloud.

Some might argue that the standards applied to the Captain of the Enterprise are a little harsh give the frat boy nature of his offense. Still, the Navy’s top brass demanded accountability – and swiftly – and not for the first time.

When the Captain’s boss “lost confidence” in him, he walked the plank – immediately.

Admiral John Harvey, in announcing that the can was tied to the Enterprise’s video host, talked about the Navy’s determination to maintain its values of “honor, courage and commitment.” Officers, Admiral Harvey said, simply must be held to the highest standards. The military code of conduct system demands it. End of story.

In the wake of his own bad behavior, Eliot Spitzer got his own television show. Increasingly, it seems, the American political system allows that sort of “accountability.” Little wonder then why the American public gives the military high approval ratings, while the public approval of Congress and other governmental institutions sinks to all-time lows.

No accountability, no confidence.